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The Federal Reserve was once content to be the giant elephant in the room that nearly everyone ignored. Few were questioning what the Fed was doing behind closed doors, let alone the mere existence of the central bank. But the rise of the Ron Paul phenomenon over the past few years has finally brought U.S. monetary policy under the spotlight where it belongs. It's time for a full comprehensive audit of the Fed.

The Fed has been forced to open some of their books twice this year. Both times top Fed officials claimed that releasing their loan information to the public would cause "severe and irreparable competitive injury" to borrowing banks. That poor excuse sure did signal that the Fed has a lot to hide. The central bank is more powerful than Congress, yet has less accountability than even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That kind of power and privacy is dangerous in the hands of an institution that has a complete monopoly over our money supply.

Bloomberg News first forced the Fed to release documents back in April. The financial news organization went through an arduous, three-year court battle to make some documents public through the Freedom of Information Act. The Fed, which repeatedly appealed court decisions and requested numerous delays, took its fight for secrecy all the way to the Supreme Court and lost.

Our suspicions proved true when the 28,000 pages of released documents revealed massive foreign bank bailouts during the height of the financial crisis. The Fed secretly loaned money to the Bank of China, Brussels- and Paris-based Dexia SA, Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc and even the Arab Bank Corporation, which was partly owned by the Libyan central bank at the time. No wonder the Fed fought tooth and nail to keep these documents under wraps.

The first ever audit of the Federal Reserve was conducted back in July. Due to a provision under the misguided Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a one-time, watered-down audit of the central bank. It gave the American people their first peek into the central bank's books, but prevented investigators from peering into their deliberations on interest rates and the most crucial transactions of the Fed. The audit findings were infuriating but should have surprised no one.

It exposed that unelected bureaucrats at the Fed "loaned" out $16 trillion at 0% interest to corporations and banks around the world in less than three years. To put that number into perspective, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) -- the value of all economic activity within a country -- of the U.S. is only $14.12 trillion. Billions of dollars may even be missing from their released records. The central bank just handed out colossal amounts of money to its Wall Street cronies without a single vote taking place in any chamber of Congress.

The watered-down audit conducted last month was a victory, but we still have a long way to go in the fight for Fed transparency. The documents that were released in April and July are further evidence that we need a true audit of the Fed. While these documents are disturbing enough, just imagine what kind of mischief we would find through a real audit. The Federal Reserve loaning trillions to foreign banks may just be the tip of the iceberg.

An overwhelming 75% of Americans want a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. We deserve to know what is happening to our money supply behind closed doors. This is a transparency issue that has transcended left vs. right politics. Fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Rep. Ron Paul, Texas, as well as self-identified Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont, are working to shed light on the Fed's manipulation of monetary policy. No one has a good reason to oppose an audit of the world's most powerful central bank.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is looking a little more nervous these days. He knows that the calls for a true audit of the central bank are getting louder and stronger. We will keep the pressure on until transparency and openness ultimately win.

Matt Kibbe is president and CEO of FreedomWorks, a nation-wide grassroots organization fighting for lower taxes, less government and freedom and the co-author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.